Taaku woke up to a world that was already wonderfully dark and cool. The goblin was curled up against him, sound asleep, hugging the plant bag it kept bugs in. He poked it in the side with one talon to wake it up.

"Hm, wha?" Greyex twitched a little, and snorted and mumbled.

"Are there any food bugs in your plant bag?" Taaku wasted no time; he got right to the point. Breakfast. The point was breakfast.

"Oh, yeah." The goblin's face stretched wide in a toothy yawn. "You can have 'em all, I already ate."

He could tell if Greyex was telling the truth or lying or what, but he was hungry enough to let it do what it wanted as long as he got something to eat.

The plant bag turned out to be half full of bugs. Taaku poured them into his mouth, pausing only to swallow between batches, until his stomach was pleasantly full. The bugs were still weird to eat - small and slimy or hard, and they didn't smell like much, and they were cold, too, but at least they moved around and tickled in his belly. Minutes passed, and the bag was empty, but the ticklish sensation of live food persisted - more normal fare, rats or small lizards, would have stopped by now.

Maybe there was something to this "bug eating" thing after all.

"Is there any water?" He asked. He felt a lot better now, but he was still thirsty.

"Yeah, I pulled some vines in before I went to sleep," the goblin yawned expansively. There were bits of plant stuck between its teeth. "Help yourself. I'll get more for us to carry before we move on." Greyex's voice trailed off into even breathing as it fell asleep again.

Taaku bit on one of the vines for a while until his disgust of the slimy, bitter plant water exceeded his need for something to drink.

Immediate needs taken care of, he looked around himself. It looked like he was where he'd fallen asleep, but the "cave" made of half dry grass was new. He didn't see a way out, either.

Something skittered over his tail, and he spun around. There were bugs crawling in and out of a basket he hadn't seen before. They looked like the same bugs from the food bag. They moved like the bugs from the food bag. He picked one up and ate it.

It was a bug.

He ate all of the basket bugs and felt pleasantly full. They may have been very small, but there were a lot of them. With nothing else to do, Taaku lay down next to Greyex and tried to go back to sleep. It didn't work very well, so he settled for keeping watch while his goblin slumbered.

---

Greyex woke slowly to a repetitive tap, tap, tap sound. He blinked his eyes, saw that it was still dark, and blinked his eyes again. The tapping continued.

"B- whuu?" he slurred, rubbing one eye and immediately regretting the decision. "'S dark," he grumbled while he blinked furiously to clear his now stinging eye of dirt.

"Yes," something hissed in his ear. "It is dark. I am rested. I am better. You led me through the light. I will lead you through the night."

As... reasonable as that sounded, Greyex didn't feel reasonable. He felt tired. And cold.

It was the cold that decided him.

"Alright," he grumbled. "I made a basket for you."

"For me?" It was hard to tell emotion from Taaku's hissing, clicking voice, but Greyex thought it sounded happy.

"Ye-ah," he yawned, "so you could carry things too."

The kobold dove to the ground and scrabbled about, then popped up too close for comfort and shoved what felt like the basket in question into Greyex's chest.

"It is for wearing?" it chirped. "How do I wear it?"

Greyex fumbled in the darkness to help Taaku get the coarse twine strap over its shoulder. He fumbled with his words, too, but that was because he was tired. Eventually, they got the basket in place, and then they had to repeat the whole ordeal with Greyex's bag.

Both bag and basket had been emptied of bugs. The remaining twigs were gone, too.

"Ready," Greyex said once his bag was secured to his loincloth.

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"Then let's go!" Taaku chirped, actually chirped, like a bird. "How do we leave the grass cave?"

Greyex had to suppress laughter. He groped his way forward int the darkness, and shoved some of the drying grass aside, making an opening.

"Through the wall," he said, probably calmly. Definitely not with a little chuckle, no, that would have been rude.

"Oooh," the kobold said. It might have been a sound of acknowledgement or understanding. Greyex chose to think that it was an impressed sound. He crawled out through the opening, then waited, crouched, on the cool ground.

Stars twinkled and glowed overhead, and the world beneath them was impenetrable shadow. Greyex was well and truly blind.

He heard Taaku exit the goblin hut. He didn't see anything, of course, but he heard the soft footsteps, the scratch scratch of talons in grass, the sshhhh sound of a long tail dragging on the ground.

A chill ran up his back and Greyex regretted leaving the comparative safety of his goblin hut.

"You really can't see anything, can you?" Taaku asked from right in front of him how did it get there???

Greyex yipped in alarm and fell over onto a pointy rock. He shot up, gritting his teeth and whining as softly as he could manage, hands snapping to his backside while he tried not to dance around too much lest he step on something, too. He could feel the tears in his eyes, but they didn't impede his vision - because he couldn't see anything anyway because it was night time.

A soft hissing sound from the side startled him and he lost his balance again.

Cold claws gripped his arm and warm liquid ran down his legs. Distantly, it occurred to him that if he survived this, he was going to have to find a way to clean his loincloth.

"It's just me," Taaku said. "Deep breaths, relax, you're going to hold onto the end of my tail, and I'll lead you forward."

Greyex couldn't find his words. He nodded his head instead. Something cool and scaly was put in his hand, and he gripped it like his life depended on it, mostly because it did.

"Maaaaybe hold on a liiiitle more gently," the kobold said. Its voice was higher pitched and hissed more than usual.

Oops. Greyex relaxed his grip from crushing to firm. Taaku let out a long, soft hiss, probably its version of a sigh of relief.

The kobold started forward, and Greyex stumbled after it, holding firm to the tip of its tail. He figured out pretty quickly that it was twitching its tail this way and that to let him know where to step. If the tail went up, he knew they were going up something; if it went down, they were going down an incline in a moment. Left and right guided him around obstacles that he would have had no way to know about.

"You're really good at this," he said softly once they'd gone all the way down the hill and started up the next one.

"The warrens are dark," Taaku said. "Always. Sometimes, hunters are dazzled by the sun, if they are out too late. Sometimes, elders do not see well anymore. Sometimes, there is an injury to the eyes. Every kobold learns to guide others young.

"What do goblins do, when one is old or hurt and cannot see well?"

"We eat them," Greyex answered without thinking.

He walked into Taaku's back when the kobold stopped walking.

"I was hurt, when you found me." Taaku's tail lashed in agitation, and Greyex lost his grip on it. "Why did you not eat me?"

Greyex turned his eyes away from the voice in the darkness.

"I am not the most goblin-like of goblins," he said softly, embarrassed. "I could have eaten you, but I thought a friend would be better than a meal. Goblins are not meant to be alone."

The tail stopped whipping at him. Greyex gingerly picked it back up.

"Kobolds are also not meant to be alone," Taaku said. "We take care of our hurt, our sick, our old, until they get better."

"What if they don't get better?"

"Then we take care of them until they die." Taaku started to walk again, slower than before, choosing its words as carefully as its footing. "And then we do not eat them."

Greyex frowned. How odd. That sounded like a waste of food.

"What do you do with your dead, then?" he asked.

"Sometimes, we bury in the ground. Sometimes, we give to masters, and masters eat them. Sometimes, we use as bait, but we never eat our own dead."

The conversation continued, stilted and awkward, throughout the night. Hours later, when the sky began to grow light and they had gone some distance, Taaku stopped again.

"Sun is coming," it said. "Time to rest."

"I can take over leading," Greyex pointed out.

"Here is a good place for rest," Taaku said. "I will sleep, and you will wake me, partway through the day, to continue. Then you will sleep, and partway through the night, I may wake you. While I sleep, you will find food, and water, and share with me when I wake."

---

Taaku waited patiently for the goblin to figure out what he was getting at. It was starting to get uncomfortably bright when understanding finally crossed that weird, squashy face.

"I can forage," it said softly. "I can forage while you sleep during the day, then wake you up when I get tired so you can eat and drink. If we travel at night, I can forage and make tools during the day."

Taaku nodded his head. Greyex understood. Good.

He twitched his tail and led his goblin to the hollow log he'd spotted. It was full of moss and covered in mushrooms, but it didn't smell too musty, and the moss was soft for sleeping on. It had bugs, too, but he didn't know which ones were good to eat.

Taaku lay his head down and drifted off to sleep. The industrious sounds of a companion poking things and muttering, looking for food and water, lulled him off to dreamland before long.

---

Meanwhile, back at the dungeon...

I bit the bullet and modeled several different water sources at the same time. I added tubes and tunnels under the floor to move water from one bed of flowers to the next (in the model, of course). I attached a few depressions for water to well up from, and included instructions to only produce water when the flowers were thirsty.

This time, the simulation worked as intended. This time, when I spent nearly a dozen impurities to implement my solution, none of my minions were flattened or knocked to the ground or otherwise inconvenienced or injured.

Metaphorically, I sat back and congratulated myself.

It was about time, and it felt damn good to solve a tricky problem.